Undergraduate software engineering courses aim
to prepare students to deliver software in a variety of
domains. The manner in which these courses are
conducted varies, though team projects with real or
imaginary stakeholders are common. While the key
course concepts vary from the entire lifecycle to
specific aspects of design, concepts like accessibility
are rare.
This paper will present a study of team projects in
a requirements engineering course. One group of
students conducted projects with accessibility
requirements while another group of students
delivered projects without accessibility requirements.
The course content was the same, including discussion
of accessibility. To support the understanding of
accessibility, stakeholders with disabilities were
included in the requirements engineering process.
Both teams benefited from the experience as indirect
knowledge acquisition occurred. Students from a
previous offering of the course, with no external
stakeholder interaction, demonstrated lower levels of
accessibility understanding.